Shrine to Falling Microbes is a 3D virtual environment, generative animation, and website built with Three.js to honour microbes that have disappeared or declined, especially in the West. A healthy gut relies on microbial diversity, and a loss of this diversity increases the risk of monoculture infections. This need for biological diversity parallels the importance of cultural diversity among people.

The interactive environment includes shrines to microbes like Bifidobacterium longum (which helps digest breastmilk) and Oxalobacter formigenes (which protects against kidney stones). Textures were generated using Stable Diffusion AI, trained on real bacteria images, offering a vision of lost microbes. The starry sky reflects the idea of the dead becoming immortalized, while the watery landscape highlights the impact of climate change on the microbiome.

Stored on the “permaweb” via Arweave to preserve microbial history for centuries, this project is part of the Shareable Biome series, which explores the cultural and geographic spread of fecal microbiota transplants (FMT) through data from OpenBiome and research with Kings College and the Science Gallery London.